


One in Four

by AndreaLyn



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-05
Updated: 2014-07-05
Packaged: 2018-01-18 06:21:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1418220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If there's one thing an alternate version of yourself can teach you, it's 'don't get ridiculously hurt when your significant other can hurt you so much more'. Kirk's left to figure out why the alternate version of himself got so much luckier than he did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It all starts with a rift in space caused by the mining operations on a desert planet that’s using technology they’ve found and don’t understand. The USS Enterprise had responded to the call with so much initiative that the ship had hopped worlds to do it. A Captain James T. Kirk from somewhere far, far away had beamed to the surface of the planet to investigate before being gored by hostile natives and their protective desire to keep the technology to themselves.  
  
The Enterprise beams him back up.  
  
The only problem is that there are currently two Enterprise ships orbiting in the atmosphere and only one of them belongs. Captain Kirk has also been beamed aboard the wrong ship along with some of his crew.   
  
*  
  
The  _Enterprise_  is suddenly louder than it’s been in the year and a half they’ve been on this mission when the Other-Kirk is suddenly screaming up a storm loud enough to rival mothers going into childbirth. He’s brought the Other-Uhura with him to the medical bay while the secondary (as Kirk calls him) version of Spock has gone to engineering to try and find a way to reverse the polarity of the forward thrust that brought them into this universe through the rip in space. Conversations, thoughts, and many other things are being disrupted by Other-Kirk’s severe shouts.  
  
And Jim Kirk will say this one thing. He doesn’t ever want to see himself in so much pain every again.  
  
“Where  _is_  she?” Other-Kirk is demanding as units of blood pour out of him and the nurses and medics tend to him while Bones starts to assemble medicine to put together something that won’t flare an allergic reaction. “ **Where is she?** ”  
  
Kirk frowns, glancing around the med-bay. “Uhura? She’s right here.”  
  
While Kirk’s Uhura is on the bridge trying to send out communications in order to find help, this one is soothing the Other-Kirk by rubbing a hand up and down his arm.  
  
If this is the first time Kirk’s noticed the wedding band on his counterpart’s hand, he’s not saying anything. He might be silently cheering that him on for bagging Uhura, even if he’s not exactly sure how marriage would work. Sure, being the Captain of the Enterprise has slowed him down, but it hasn’t exactly brought him to a full stop … or so you could say.   
  
“Not… _her_ ,” other-Kirk gasps out through gritted teeth before letting out a howl of pain when Bones injects him with the hypospray.   
  
“You know she had a day off. She’s beaming over as soon as she can, Captain,” the other-Uhura assuages him gently, still rubbing his shoulder. “Not that she’s going to do anything but tear your throat out for getting injured.”  
  
Kirk’s got so many questions and he doesn’t even know where to start. He wants to know about this ‘she’, he wants to know exactly what the other universe is like, and he also wants to know why it seems like Bones is so delighted to get to keep sticking painful needles into versions of him. He also wants to yank his counterpart away somewhere private and demand to know exactly what tricks the wife must know in order to have slapped a wedding band on that finger. She’s got to be a contortionist or something. Or she could be twins, even if that doesn’t make sense.  
  
As if on cue, the doors to the medical bay glide open and two of the ship’s security guards trail a furious storm in the form of an angry woman, arriving at Other-Kirk’s bedside and appraising his body for a moment before landing three punches to very well-placed areas, as if she already knows exactly what will hurt, what won’t, and it doesn’t even seem like it makes a difference when she lands a punch where it won’t hurt followed by one where it will.   
  
Out of compassion for himself, Kirk winces all the while.  
  
“Damn it,” she starts, glowering at other-Kirk. “What happened to ‘I’ll be careful, Leah, I really will’. Don’t make me cut your balls off like I threatened to, Jim, because I will, I really will,” she swears, eyes about as crazy as Kirk’s ever seen on a woman or man and that’s some premium grade promise in her tone. Other-Kirk unleashes some heavy puppy-dog eyes on her, but it doesn’t seem to be doing a thing.   
  
Sometime in the last little while, Bones has dropped back to hover by Kirk.  
  
“Leah, come on…”  
  
“You even so much as try that stuff you give the girls back home on me and you’ll be getting a good dose of something that  _will_  give you an allergic reaction and render that tongue of yours useless.”  
  
Other-Uhura has shifted away and now this Leah woman in civilian wear is poking two fingers heavily against Other-Kirk’s shoulder and digging…  
  
“Oh man, that’s a pressure point,” Kirk says in sympathy and has to turn away so as not to see himself (…or, kind of) get tortured.  
  
Bones is just grinning away as he watches the scene, arms folded over his chest. “I  _like_  her.”  
  
“You would,” Kirk mutters and tries to drag himself away from the scene of the possible-crime, yanking Bones with him to give Leah some privacy while she manhandles Kirk’s parallel-versed companion. “Dinner in the Captain’s quarters tonight!” he announces to the alternate-reality visitors. “…if no one’s been murdered by then,” he adds and nearly gets himself shoved out by an over-eager Bones, making him yelp while trying to see if his alternate-reality counterpart is going to survive the massive beatdown he’s getting from that woman.   
  
*  
  
Kirk invites the majority of the bridge to dinner, but most of them cancel when they realize exactly how awkward the evening might be with alternate versions of Kirk and Uhura lingering around and the mysteriously angry woman who is still angry as she picks at her plate while swatting away at Other-Kirk’s intruding fingers (trying to brush away at hair and make affectionate touches to her neck). Chekov’s come because the kid’s too curious about life in general. Because Chekov is there, Sulu is, and because there’s alcohol, Scotty’s invited himself along for the ‘ride’, as he calls it. Uhura has decided that she would ‘rather not spend an entire evening staring at myself as not all of have gigantic egos,  _Captain_ ’ and Spock’s gone with her in solidarity. Which leaves one spot at the table for Bones because Kirk’s informed him that if he doesn’t show up, Kirk will go out of his way to contract as many alien STD’s as possible to make Bones’ life a living hell.   
  
It’s when Kirk’s pouring everyone wine from the vineyards outside Starfleet Academy on Earth that he lets his mouth get away from him. His other-self looks to be healing rapidly, though the bruises on his face aren’t diminishing in the least. He looks well enough to be at dinner and he’s definitely taking every opportunity to turn those pleading and pouting eyes on the woman he’d called Leah before.   
  
“So,” Kirk begins warmly, settling down in the Captain’s chair and adorning his lap with a napkin. “We all clearly know Lieutenant Uhura and her very admirable  _oral_  skills…” And look at that, the glare’s the same in all universes. “…but you and I haven’t met,” Kirk says with a lascivious grin as he bears his gaze down on Leah, unable to help the charm that comes of being James T. Kirk. She hasn’t exactly gone to great lengths to put herself together. It looks like maybe she took a comb to the hair, but she’s managing one hell of a glare at everyone who’s there and staring at Bones’ glass of brandy with an almost insurmountable amount of envy in her eyes.   
  
She only drags her eyes away from the alcohol when she gets nudged in the side by Other-Kirk. “This is Leah Kirk,” he announces with great pride and delight.  
  
“Like  _hell_  I am,” she snarls right back at him. “I never consented to take your name in the marriage.” She turns her head to Kirk and offers him the first hint of a smile that’s pure (even if it’s likely only making an appearance out of some cynical, fucked-up sort of revenge against her Kirk). “Leah McCoy, CMO of the Enterprise,” she introduces herself with a demure nod of her head.  
  
And that’s when Kirk wishes he hadn’t been drinking from his glass of wine just then.  
  
He chokes.  
  
Bones pales.   
  
“ _Prostite chto vy skazali_ ,” comes from Chekov, as if he’s forgotten what language they’re in.   
  
“What did I say?” Leah asks warily when Bones shoves his chair away from the table and storms out of Kirk’s quarters, trailed suddenly by a very fraught Captain of the Enterprise while the alternate versions watch the sudden display with absolutely no knowledge as to what’s going on.  
  
Sulu is speechless and Scotty glances up from the table and glances down to the other end, watching Other-Kirk rub his thumb against Leah’s palm. “Oh, now that’s just strange,” he opines. “You two’re  _married_. As in married? As in the kind of married where you actually have sex together?”  
  
“Not anymore if Captain Giant Ego over here keeps getting hurt,” Leah snaps.  
  
“Well, now, that’s just weird,” Scotty says again, wrinkling his nose as he reaches over to add Bones’ brandy to his own glass to create a very potent hybrid of alcohols.   
  
“What in hell is so  _weird_  about it?” Other-Kirk finally snaps.  
  
“Well, sir,” Sulu finally speaks up with the utmost respect echoing in his voice. “Beyond the fact that I think any of us have trouble with the notion of you managing to…how shall I put this…keep it to yourself long enough to settle down, Dr. McCoy isn’t exactly fond of the Captain in that way in this universe.”  
  
“Not fond how?” Leah pipes up suspiciously, narrowing her eyes.  
  
“He is ze one who stormed out!” Chekov continues helpfully, smacking his palm against the other and creating an emphatic gesture in the direction of the door. “Captain Kirk followed him.”  
  
“Him?” Other-Kirk and Leah McCoy echo at once with severe incredulity. Suddenly, whatever feud they’d been going on about earlier fades away and they and the Other-Uhura all begin to congregate and have their own hushed discussion while the members of the Enterprise all look between each other.   
  
Scotty raises a brow with an indignant scoff. “I’m not going after them if you’re not!”  
  
*  
  
Kirk’s charging down the halls as if he’s trying to save the world all over again when really he’s just trying to catch up to McCoy’s long strides. He nearly skids to a stop in front of him and grabs him by the upper arms to get him to stay still. “First of all, I have every right to be as freaked out as you do!” Kirk announces immediately.  
  
“You’re not staring at some alternate version of yourself where you’re a woman,” McCoy snaps right back at him.  
  
“…Point.”  
  
“And that woman version of yourself didn’t marry an egotistical sex-maniac with rocks for brains who wouldn’t know self-preservation if it leapt out of the caverns on Delta-Vega and bit him in the  _ass_ ,” McCoy adds with a pointed flare of fury in his words, leaning forward into Kirk’s personal space to get his point across. His accent’s getting thicker as he’s getting madder, which is usually a sign that Kirk should back off.  
  
Kirk finds that  _entirely_  unfair. “I have good qualities too!”  
  
“Maybe you just screwed me and I caught something that atrophied my brain cells,” McCoy’s muttering as he pushes past Kirk into his room, burrowing through his possessions until he comes up with his flask and takes the longest swig out of it that Kirk’s ever seen him take.   
  
He swears constantly and Kirk feels pretty much like his stomach is ready to go and give out on him. It’s not the best feeling in the world, not even after all the various ways he’s put his body through torture just to feel alive.   
  
“Some other-world versions of us got married, Bones, and you’re blaming me?” Kirk says incredulously when they can’t seem to get over that hill. “It’s not like I sent out a missive to all parallel universes that told myself to  _seduce_  you because it’s not like I’ve done that successfully here!”   
  
Some part of his brain tells him to pull rank, except that McCoy’s never let rank get in the way of disobeying him when things are really serious.   
  
Instead he just pulls what he tends to do with McCoy. He starts to get deflated and defeated and hopes that pulls sympathy and pity out of the man. It doesn’t seem like he’s going to have much luck, though, because McCoy just keeps glaring.  
  
“So I can’t come in and stay?” Kirk assumes.  
  
“Do it and I’ll follow through on that castrating the other me was threatening earlier,” Bones agrees and looks very pointedly at the door.   
  
Kirk knows that he’s already gliding on the thinnest of ice. He’s not going to earn McCoy’s forgiveness, he’s not going to manage to make any of this better, so he decides to do the typical Jim Kirk thing and deflect it all.  
  
“C’mon, Bones, just because she’s prettier than you are…”  
  
He leaves before heavy objects can be thrown at his head and is left to deal with the utter absurdity of the situation all on his own because his best friend is busy sulking and everyone else is busy actually trying to fix the mess that caused the issue in the first place.   
  
*  
  
Kirk’s still feeling his head pounding as if he’s the Kirk that got severely beat up on the desert planet they’ve orbiting over. He’s asked the crew for an update and has found out that the alternate versions of himself, Uhura, and Spock have beamed back over to their ship to continue their work with their crew.  
  
What Kirk doesn’t expect is to open the door to Captain’s quarters and be confronted by a diminutive and girlish version of his best friend.  
  
He lets out a high-pitched yelp of surprise and staggers back until his body hits the wall, at which point he lifts both hands to defend his gorgeous face. “I’m not your Kirk, don’t hurt me!” he manages to spit out the words in a rush and winces while he waits for the pummelling to begin.   
  
“Jim and I agreed it was for the best if I stayed behind and cleared things up,” she offers, crossing his room to uncork the bottle of brandy he keeps on his desk and pouring two glasses (one twice as filled than the other, which is the one she takes). “McCoy isn’t with you?”  
  
“We had words,” Kirk explains, feeling that’s something of an understatement, but it’ll do.   
  
“He doesn’t want to even chance being around me,” she interprets from that, offering a scoff and a shake of her head. “Unbelievable. Even for myself.” If Kirk really listens carefully, he hears the slight edge of her accent peeking out and that, of all things, is what’s making him the most uncomfortable.   
  
There’s too many questions and he’s staring at probably all the wrong things (like Bones’ rack, Bones as a girl with a rack and if she hadn’t been wearing those loose clothes, he could maybe imagine it…yeah, bad places). “You married me?” is what comes out suddenly, spat out as if it can’t be contained.  
  
“We all make mistakes,” she says while she salutes using her glass. “You get a once a month dalliance off-world. Only once-a-month,” she clarifies. “Besides, it’s not like you weren’t the bane of my existence before you put the ring on my finger.”  
  
“Do you even  _like_  me?” Kirk has to wonder next. All he’s seen is that irritable side, the one he gets out of Bones by being injured or stubborn or selfish or childish. So, seventy-five percent of the time. “I mean, half the time I’m pretty sure Bones is trying to suppress a secret desire to punch me in the face.”  
  
“Ratchet that down to twenty-percent and you’re more accurate,” she advises, leaning against his desk and sipping from her drink. She grimaces and then lets out a long sigh. “Aw, c’mon, Jim, don’t look at me with the dying puppy look. How many times do I have to tell you that just because I’m not falling over my feet with the words, it’s not because I don’t love you,” she points out, crossing her arms over her chest. “I’d have just left you after one of your  _many_  fights if I didn’t.”  
  
Kirk’s feeling like he’s on definite unsteady ground here. Hearing the words ‘love you’ from his best friend in female form who’s probably screwed him many, many times? It’s definitely on the stranger side of weird.   
  
“You  _married_  me,” Kirk notes again with disbelief. “So we’ve had sex.”  
  
“I married you,” she agrees. “Which means we have too much sex than’s probably good in my old age.”  
  
“…wait, am I a stepfather then?”  
  
“When it comes up, yes,” she agrees coolly, daring him to say something about it with a challenging look in her eye. “Look, we need you to be okay with this because we’d like to get back to our actual world and if you’re sitting here and sulking, thinking about the various ways and positions in which things have happened, you’re no good to me,” she announces sharply, downing the remainder of the brandy in a swift swallow. “So don’t fuck this up, Jim.”  
  
He’s still staring into space, mouth open, lost.  
  
“Me and Bones, we’re not…” Kirk tries to get out, choking on the words as he speaks them. “We don’t.”  
  
McCoy sets the glass down on the table and makes her way to the door, pausing when she’s standing right beside Kirk and glances up at him before turning her attention to her palm, to the ring there. “Ask him about the night you met Gaila.”  
  
“Wh…”  
  
“Just do it, Jim,” she advises and pats him lightly on the cheek before making her exit.   
  
*  
  
The other Enterprise is gone before Kirk can even process that they were there to begin with. They didn’t even get a  _goodbye_  except that he’d been sent a communication from his Other-Self in his private quarters with the she-McCoy leaning over Other-Kirk’s shoulder to look at him, both elbows on Kirk’s shoulder and pressing her chin atop them, nearly cheek-to-cheek with Kirk.   
  
“Spock and Scotty say everything’s set,” Other-Kirk says, glancing up at Leah and then back at the monitor. “Bones says the other thing is settled, so we’re good to…”  
  
And then like that, the transmission had cut off and they were gone.   
  
Kirk leans back in his chair and offers his own profound grunt of defeat, not sure what to do about all of this. He files the log in the book and knows that yet another parallel reality shouldn’t be that strange after the number they’ve come across in their travels. For all he knows, Chekov’s some comely Russian teen jailbait chick over there and he just didn’t have time to see it. He rubs his hand over his cheek and wanders to the door to do what he always does when he’s feeling confused and like he needs some company.  
  
He’s going to go see Bones.   
  
Except his brain’s got duelling images of Bones right now. He’s got the best friend and the one he’s known forever and a day. Now he’s also got be-ringed and furiously-angry girl-Bones lurking around in there. She’s only occasionally taking off her clothes in the darker corners of his imagination, which makes Kirk think he’s maturing in a way. Kirk lets out a groan of frustration and decides that no alternate universe is going to get the best of him.   
  
He’s at Bones’ quarters in record time and doesn’t knock before overriding the locks with the sequence he’d memorized ages ago. What he finds is Bones drinking from his flask and sprawled on his bed.   
  
He’s pointedly ignoring Kirk’s entrance into the room.   
  
“They’re gone,” Kirk supplies helpfully as he flops onto the end of the bed and leans over Bones to steal the flask from his fingers, taking a hard sip only to scowl. “Oh.  _Oh!_  Oh god,” he manages with disgust, “what  _is_  this stuff?”  
  
“Bourbon. It’s for people with taste,” Bones replies evenly. “Did you have fun ogling my breasts?”   
  
Somehow that’s not even the weirdest thing that Kirk’s ever heard in his life and he’s not sure what to make of that. Part of him blames Starfleet. Part of him blames his desire to see the stranger things in life in order to consider himself accomplished in some way.   
  
He settles and hunches forward, his posture horrible while he stares at his hands and resolutely doesn’t think about wedding rings on those fingers or the weight of McCoy in the bed behind him. At least, he doesn’t think too hard about it until he lets his brain drift.  _That night with Gaila_. Kirk barely remembers that. It’s such a haze and he remembers getting in a fight, almost passing out drunk, almost needing his stomach pumped. He’d woken up in the morning to Gaila peering down at him and Kirk had been so out of it that he’d almost asked if he was seeing colors because he could  _swear_  there was a green woman in front of him.  
  
“She said I had to ask you about the night I met Gaila,” Kirk says, trying to take a stab at actually discussing things.  
  
Bones has already been silent, but if it’s possible, he goes icy and the silence turns eerie. It goes so quiet that Kirk has to crane a look over his shoulder to make sure Bones hasn’t managed to get Scotty to beam him out of there. Bones is still there and is rubbing his thumb considerately over the metallic casing of the flask, averting his eyes.  
  
“What…” Kirk starts uncomfortably, not sure if he should be probing this. “What really happened that night?”   
  
“Why don’t you call up the little woman?”  
  
“They’re gone, Bones,” Kirk reminds him, and in three words, he’s managed to encapsulate how absolutely hopeless and confused he feels about all of this. The people who have their answers are gone, back to the proper universe and all they’ve got left are the ripples from the stone they’ve thrown into the pond. “What happened?”  
  
“I told you the day after that you’d been hitting on Gaila all night, yeah?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Bones sighs and grimaces, rubbing a hand over his face. “Well, you weren’t. I grabbed her from the bar because she had that thing for you and she’d help me get you to the hospital after you got beat up.”  
  
“Wait. I got beat up by her ex-boyfriend, right?”  
  
“No, Jim,” Bones manages uncomfortably. “You got beat up by the guy I was talking to. You interrupted, about six sheets to the wind,” he mutters, “and started feeling me up. The first time, he just shrugged it off, but seeing as I think he was trying to get me between his sheets, he didn’t exactly take well to you coming back to flirt about four more times.”  
  
“Wait, why does other-me know about this?” Kirk demands suddenly, trying to fit all these new pieces into a puzzle he  _really_  doesn’t understand.  
  
Bones shoots him the pointed look of ‘I have no clue in the world, you moron’ and Kirk shuts his mouth before he can ask anything more. Maybe in that world, the other-him has just slightly more sense and didn’t get so beat up that the whole night is best served as a blackout.  
  
“Anyway, come morning, I was getting coffee and you and Gaila were hitting it off so goddamn well that I didn’t bother to interrupt you.” Bones is narrating the whole story as if it’s a medical report and simple as that and Kirk can’t believe what he’s hearing.  
  
He takes a moment to process it all.  
  
“You were getting hit on by a guy. All this time I threw women your way and you never had sex with any of them!”  
  
“My ex ruined women for me,” Bones mutters bitterly. “I look at ‘em and all I see is the divorce settlement and hear every last insult she lobbed my way in those last few years. Excuse me for not wanting to go back to that.”  
  
“So. Men.”  
  
“Men.”  
  
“And me?”  
  
“In some parallel universes,” Bones easily agrees.  
  
Kirk stares at him suspiciously, trying to ignore Bones’ barriers shooting up around him to try and protect information. There’s something else here, Kirk can  _feel_  it and he shifts on the bed and has an idea. It’s out of left field and he needs to test it, but the best way to do that is to start crawling on top of Bones.  
  
“Jim? Kid?”  
  
“Sorry, Bones, I’m completely lost,” Kirk admits, bracing himself on all fours above McCoy’s recumbent body. “Because you don’t want to look at women anymore and I…don’t really ever discriminate between, you know…gender or species…”  
  
“I don’t need a speech about how much of a slut you are, Jim-boy,” McCoy drawls, hauling out the big guns with that nickname.   
  
Kirk just smirks when he feels that he’s finally got the upper hand in this situation. He’s not even touching McCoy’s body with his own and years of misunderstandings have come colliding into one great epiphany. McCoy doesn’t want to look at women again and Kirk had spent a whole night trying to get into McCoy’s pants and some alternate universe pretty much just gave them a gigantic stamp of approval without them even asking for it.  
  
“You let me stray once a month.”  
  
“Jim, did you hit your head again, because we had that talk about you making sure to check the height of the ceiling…”  
  
“Bones! She told me you let me wander once a month. I got once a month reprieves.” His eyes are gleaming, almost manic. “I mean, if I know me, I’m probably only cashing in on that once every three months and making you crazy by not telling you  _when_  I got lucky…”  
  
“Is this your half-assed attempt at seduction?” Bones interrupts him.  
  
“Yeah. It kinda is.”  
  
In days going forward, it will be Scotty who is most vehement about how very  _weird_  it all is. Of course, he’s also the one who informs McCoy that he’d made a very fetching woman and got a hypospray to the neck ‘for pre-emptive purposes’.   
  
After that, no one really says anything about them at all.   
  
*  
  
It turns out that Kirk is wrong about what he’d told Bones.  
  
It’s more like one in four.


	2. Family

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Four years later. Chekov's been unfairly lipsticked, Joanna McCoy knows her way around manipulating a man's heart, Kirk still loves group hugs, and McCoy wants a drink.

At three o’clock in the morning, the Enterprise could yield many forms of entertainment depending on which hall you were standing in. You could listen in on the mind-meld that Uhura and Spock practiced. You could hear Chekov pleading for pity and Sulu’s delighted victory in whatever sport or game they had picked up (they had moved from fencing to chess to a Russian drinking game that had put them both in sickbay). If you wandered to the bridge, you could hear the soft hum of a ship working soundly. If you were in engineering, you would hear Scotty’s soft proclamations of adoration for said ship.  
  
Four years and three months into their five year mission and if you stood outside Captain Kirk’s door, you would hear nothing. At least, not at three o’clock. An hour later, however, and there begins to rouse the first noises of the day.  
  
“Bones,” Kirk whispers, poking at the naked back of his companion while rustling and rumpling the heavy burgundy sheets that kept them both decent, for the most part. “Bones, wake up.” He receives a heavy grumble for his trouble and Kirk just takes that as a signal to lean even harder, elbow jamming into him. “Bones, we just got a signal.”  
  
“Mmmfhwh...c’ninthemo...” is the muffled response from McCoy’s pillow. This is a nightly routine they’ve developed over many years. Kirk had taken his counterpart’s lead and so what if this Bones doesn’t have a rack and they didn’t get things together way earlier and have no special wedding bands? So what. He’s got Bones and they’re good together because Bones refuses to let Kirk be anything else. Bones doesn’t exactly know that Kirk has stopped indulging in his monthly-reprieve and hasn’t done so for eleven months now (and he doesn’t know how sporadic it’d been before that).   
  
Kirk leans heavier and grins an evil smirk, the smile of a man who has a plan.  
  
“Bones, I’m going to turn the shipwide communication system on and suck you off if you don’t wake up,” Kirk threatens with a very serious tone.   
  
“Do it and you’ll regret it,” Bones grumbles, shifting in the bed and turning enough so that they can have a groggy conversation. “I have my ways.”  
  
“My birthday last year assures that I know that,” Kirk grumbles and tries not to think about a particularly nasty-shaped bruise that came of...well, you know what, he’d rather not say and that donkey that had been involved isn’t going to say a word about it either, so they’re both taking it to the grave. He groans and shifts, chin pressed to the valley on Bones’ back, the sweet curve inwards of his spine. “We have to go back to that mining planet. You know the one.”  
  
There’s been a lot of mining planets. Only one of them had delivered a force powerful enough to rip open space and deliver them a door to another universe. Only one of them gave Kirk a peek at what life’s like when he and Bones get it together properly (switched genders notwithstanding).  
  
“And why do we have to do that?”  
  
“It’s opened again. We got summoned, something about needing your biosignature on the other end or...or, I don’t know. It’s like, four in the morning, Bones, and I’m still exhausted from what you did with your tongue earlier,” Kirk groans and presses his cheek tiredly to Bones’ back. “They say it’s going to take like, a night. We pop you over, get you all ready, we come back, it’s sealed.”  
  
“For good?”  
  
“What am I, the time and space expert now?” Kirk complains. “I’m a captain, Bones, not the most fascinating man on this...oh hey wait, yes I am,” he smugly remarks and grins. He’s still grinning when Bones decides to flip him right over and pin him to the bed. “Is this the part where I get my morning wake-up call?” he asks, wiggling his brow up and down.  
  
“This is the part where I collapse on you because I’m working beta shift and apparently then I’m hopping over to go see myself as a woman, except four years older, and god knows what else has changed since the last time,” McCoy grumbles and pins Kirk in by nudging his elbows to either side of the man and making sure Kirk can’t even move a single inch without having issues.   
  
Kirk ought to be pissed off. Except it’s almost kind of cute how Bones falls right back asleep on top of him. Not that he’ll ever tell Bones this because apparently the word ‘cute’ is just not to be used in his vicinity because it’s not for middle-aged doctors or some other bullshit like that. Still, it’s cute. Kirk will defend that one for the rest of his life.  
  
*  
  
Kirk beams over first because Bones has a conference in which the ‘Doctor must be prepared with the appropriate knowledge’ according to Spock and he’s already been getting excited messages from the other-Jim about how he has to get over there. Apparently he and Leah are due to be doing something else while everyone puts a fix on things. Something about ‘things going on as normal’ and Kirk gets that. If he and Bones had plans, he wouldn’t want some inter-universal thing to come screw it all up.   
  
“Enterprise to Enterprise,” Kirk says, unable to help the thrill that cuts through him at the thought of two of his ship out there, so close they’re almost touching. “Beam me aboard.”  
  
“Aye, Captain,” comes the disembodied and very familiar voice from the other side (and Scotty looks none too thrilled with that) before Kirk blinks and reopens his eyes to the same room. Or, okay,  _almost_  the same because he sees Ensign Purcy, he sees Scotty, and he sees one of the most wonderful visions in a long and tight red dress that he’s ever seen in his life. Kirk decides right then and there that it doesn’t count as cheating on Bones when it’s Bones-herself. Also, he’s technically still allowed to stray and Bones just doesn’t know he hasn’t found fit to.   
  
“Well, hello,” Kirk whistles with a grin and bounds down from the transporter pad to drape an arm around Leah’s shoulder. “All this welcome for me? I’d say you shouldn’t have, but I really, really appreciate the...ow, Bones, that’s my finger.”  
  
“I don’t have any qualms about breaking them again,” she assures him.  
  
“...again?”  
  
The doors glide open and Kirk grins even wider than before when he sees that dashing and charming smile of his reflected back at him without use of a mirror or shiny surface. Call him a narcissist (which the majority of the population of Starfleet has tendency to do), but he can’t help but love the sight of his handsome face. Jim’s grinning right back at Kirk, but he looks tired. Leah does too, in point of fact, and Kirk immediately sees what she’s talking about. Kirk’s definitely got splinted fingers on his left hand.  
  
“Your broke our fingers?” Kirk struggles to get out when the transporter is activated again and there’s only one person possibly coming through. Kirk still doesn’t get his answer and he’s staring at the both of them like a lost puppy. He’s still grateful when he turns and finds his Bones there with him, sliding his hand onto the small of Kirk’s back.   
  
“Alright,” Bones grumbles, trying to avert his eyes off of his alternate self. “Where do you...”  
  
“Ensign Chekov to Doctor McCoy,” the communicator interrupts their conversation and she rolls her eyes. Kirk thinks that at least he’s got one answer. Chekov definitely doesn’t _sound_  like some hot Russian chick in this alternate reality. Of course, that doesn’t exclude the possibility, but it’s good evidence. “Please, please come in,” he begs.  
  
“What is it, Pavel?” Leah mutters as she turns away slightly.  
  
“It is your daughter, she is...”  
  
There is high and distinct girlish laughter from behind him that accompanies Chekov’s desperate ‘please! I tell your mother and father I would not let you misbehave and...’ along with a weary sigh. “Joanna is not listening and is being wery difficult,” he complains.   
  
“It was your idea to let him babysit,” Leah accuses Jim as she gets out a quick ‘we’ll be there in a second’ and corrals Kirk and Bones with a nod of her head. “Come on, you two. The universe isn’t about to completely implode and while I trust that kid with math and science, Joanna’s probably found fit to tie him to a chair and paint lipstick on him by now.”  
  
“Serves him right,” Bones grumbles.  
  
“Yeah, well, just until Joanna then wanders around later than any twelve-year-old should and using those eyes that  _someone_  taught her about to get her way.”  
  
“Come on, she had those before I came along,” Jim protests, while Kirk studies his counterpart with faint bemusement. He and Joanna have met in their universe, sure, but this kind of smacks of familiarity in a way that suggests that along with their head-start, they let things be more serious from the first moment. Jim turns to Kirk and with a single look communicates ‘you understand’. “She looked at me after I took her to the zoo, right in the eye, batted those eyelashes at me and said, ‘Daddy, I want some ice cream.’ Turns out she used that  _exact_  line on Sulu and Scotty too,” he notes wryly.  
  
“Jim, you’re fair game as far as she’s concerned,” Leah notes as she hitches up the hem of her dress and starts to head down the halls. “I’m pressing the two of you into babysitting duty. Anything breaks, you buy it.”  
  
She’s walking with swift determination and it’s actually a bit impressive considering the heels she’s in and gestures to the same quarters that both Kirk and Bones would know by heart back on their own ship.   
  
“Come on,” she says. Jim’s hovering behind her like a shadow and Bones seems apprehensive to go inside. Kirk’s pretty well aware why. He’s got a Joanna back home, but this is different. This Joanna’s never met him before, not as he is. Kirk himself doesn’t know what to expect, but he’s boldly gone to so many planets that he refuses to be intimidated by his own quarters. So he charges right in and finds himself face-to-face with a lipsticked-Chekov, a grinning twelve-year-old Joanna McCoy, and Jim taking hold of a tiny blanketed bundle in his arms.  
  
Joanna huffs a little sigh, still grinning sweetly. “Mr. Pavel wouldn’t let me put makeup on Savannah so I used him as a model instead!” she complains right up to Bones, who looks as if he might faint any minute. Kirk’s pretty much thinking about doing the same if it wouldn’t cause a pile-up in the room. Leah’s busy handing Chekov some handkerchiefs before making her way to Jim’s side and that bundle. That little bundle that is now making squeaking noises.  
  
 _Oh my god, please let it be a dog, please god let it be a whiny dog,_  Kirk prays to himself, even when Leah and Jim start conferring over the bundle with precise, official terms. Kirk is ready to look for pointy-ears or for someone else’s features so he can assign this kid to someone else. He has completely and absolutely convinced himself that this is just a favor they’re doing for Spock and Uhura when his counterpart turns to him.  
  
He’s not about to get that lucky tonight.  
  
*  
  
Bones is convinced that he’s gone insane. He’s watching an alternate version of the man he’s with gently rock a blue-blanketed-bundle in which there is definitely a baby. It’s not exactly a stretch of the imagination to figure out who it belongs to, either.  
  
“She really likes it when you tell her about all your stories from the Academy,” Jim enthuses.  
  
“Oh for...she’s an infant and you’re telling her dirty stories?” Bones nearly explodes from right behind him, finding an indignant reaction from somewhere deep beneath all that shock that’s resonating on the outside. “How old?” he asks clinically, eyes on Leah.  
  
“Three months. I broke his hand in labor for doing this to me. Us,” she amends slightly, catching McCoy’s crazed look. “We forgot to give him the right hypospray after he nearly died during a mission out to negotiate new treaty terms in the Laurentian system.” She sounds as if she’s had this conversation many times with herself as if to justify it. “She’s...we love her,” Leah gets out, strained. “It’s just not exactly planned to the last detail,” she keeps going, voice hushed to keep Joanna out of the conversation (and by extent, both Kirks who have gravitated towards cooing at the baby and McCoy is just so damned pleased that Kirk’s apparently found a new cute thing to ogle, like he needs the extra stress of this). “Mission’s almost over and then we’re going home. Jim keeps promising the kid’ll meet her grandmother, but we haven’t gotten there yet.”  
  
“Sorry,” Bones drawls, shaking his head. “I’m stuck at the part where you two procreated and the nightmares it’s bound to give me for a while.”  
  
“Think we managed to strike diverging paths, if nothing else,” Leah points out. “Events definitely, definitely aren’t the same. “ She pauses, searches McCoy’s face. “They’re not the same, are they? I swear to God, if you let Jim Kirk get his hands on one of the fertility devices of...”  
  
“Don’t even say it out loud,” McCoy cuts her off. “I’ve had to go to great and unspeakable lengths to keep all that quiet from him.” And not just from Kirk, but other members of the crew as well, not wanting to deal with  _that_  particular fallout nine months later.  
  
“Bones!” his Kirk exults in glee, apparently over his shock from only moments ago. “She has my eyes! And she has  _toes_  and they wiggle.”  
  
Both sets of McCoy’s roll their eyes heavily.  
  
“Can I at least have Jim for this date?” Leah pleads.  
  
“Yeah, take ‘em both,” McCoy mutters, even though he doesn’t really mean it and doesn’t think he could stand to let his Kirk go without undergoing one hell of a possessive fit in the process. He slumps in the closest chair and tries to ignore Joanna’s curious looks at him and wants to figure out a good explanation for all of this. Kirk’s not exactly much of a help as he’s currently playing airplane with the baby and laughing just as much as the kid’s squealing with delight.  
  
Leonard McCoy severely wants a drink right about now.  
  
He pries open one eye to watch Leah take Jim aside and then crouch in front of Joanna (while Jim gives Chekov his dismissal and a couple of credits when he doesn’t think anyone else is looking). “Okay, kiddo, you be good to the alternate versions of us. Don’t stare too much because you know just how rude that is. And the same goes for your Dad as always.”  
  
“Call you when he does something stupid,” Joanna notes dutifully in a tone that says she’s done this many times before.  
  
“Hey!” both Kirks now respond to that, though McCoy can see his Kirk both paling and beaming proudly at the very mention of ‘Dad’. It’s a conversation they’ve both had in their own world, but never got around to putting it into action. Somehow, seeing it in existence is a promising glimmer for their future.  
  
“Good girl,” Leah praises with a kiss to her hair. “I’m stealing Jim. We’ll be back in the morning before breakfast.”  
  
McCoy watches them leave the room and then it’s just a barrel of laughs because he’s sprawled on a couch while some alternate-version of his daughter stares at him and Kirk is holding some alternate-reality existence that has Kirk’s eyes and McCoy’s smattering of dark hair atop her head. The baby’s cooing lightly and grabbing hold of Kirk’s finger, jamming it in her mouth.  
  
“Bones!” Kirk natters excitedly. “Look, she has your oral fix...”  
  
“Dammit, Jim,” Bones growls, ceasing his staring contest with Joanna for a single moment to level the threat on Kirk. He softens slightly when Kirk turns and gives him a wounded and wordless look and McCoy sighs and softens, collapsing back against the couch. “Not in front of Joanna, okay?”  
  
“You’re my Dad where you come from?” Joanna asks suspiciously, still eyeing him up and down.   
  
“Yup.”  
  
“Do we get along?”  
  
“You love me to pieces.”  
  
“Did you buy me a pony for my ninth birthday?”  
  
“Where the hell would you ride it when you’re shuttling between me and your mother all the goddamn time?” Bones asks incredulously and somehow this is exactly the right thing to say because he’s suddenly being hugged as tightly as possible, Joanna’s arms thrown securely around his neck as she curls up with him.  
  
Kirk lets out a noise of delight. “Oh, hey, group hug!” and joins in with the squeaking little bundle in his arms.   
  
McCoy takes one look at the kid for the first time. “Dammit,” he gets out incredulously. “She does have your eyes.” He feels like that was supposed to be some kind of exaggeration, but there they are, all brilliant and Jim T. Kirk blue (a color he’s pretty sure has now been added to the spectrum solely thanks to the litany of praises they’ve earned from former lovers).He’s also still being hugged and while he may have fallen ass over heels for Jim, he’s still not fond of the whole hugging thing. Especially when the baby’s started to drool on his shoulder and is making gnawing noises at him. “I’m not your food,” he mutters and pries lightly out of everyone’s grasp.  
  
He settles back in the chair and closes his eyes while Joanna starts talking to Kirk a mile a minute about all the things her parents let her do (which somehow involve throwing paper airplanes at Scotty, replicated ice cream, and sitting in the captain’s chair) and Kirk’s being surprisingly stern by saying no to each and every one of them, even Joanna’s suggestion that they all play truth or dare.  
  
Kirk grunts and collapses in the seat beside him. “Bones, take your kid. She’s cute, but she’s heavy.” It’s not really a question so much as a warning as he passes the infant over and hefts Joanna up into his lap, ruffling her hair. “Okay, tell me all the dirty gossip you’ve got on all my ensigns and maybe we’ll think about throwing paper airplanes at Sulu and having Scotty beam us away before he knows it was us.”  
  
McCoy slowly finds himself drawn away as he studies the infant in his arms. She’s a quiet thing for the most part and her eyes are half-lidded in exhaustion. This is a routine as easy as breathing to get back to and he slowly glides to his feet and lifts the kid up to his shoulder to rock her gently as they maneuver the room to the quiet patter of Joanna and Kirk’s conversation.  
  
Eventually, Savannah falls asleep. Joanna’s not far behind.   
  
McCoy’s grateful to be able to slip away and start on the work that’s necessary to make sure the whole damned universe doesn’t end, but Kirk’s insisted on staying with the baby. The whole ‘being in space’ thing still messes with his sense of time, so he’s not even aware of how late it is when he sees a familiar head of hair lurking at the door to engineering and he waves her in, figuring now’s as good a time as any to talk with his other-self.   
  
“I poked my head into the room. You left Jim alone with our kids,” Leah noted, arching her brow. “Risky.”  
  
“Only Joanna is  _ours_ ,” McCoy clarifies, leaning idly against the console of some machine Scotty’s been trying to explain to him. Apparently Bones’ DNA is important because of the differences and the reason they need it is to essentially tell the rip in space where to close so everyone’s where they belong. “The baby’s all yours.”  
  
“He’s a good father, you know,” she says strongly with great love in her tone. “Took him a little to get used to that fact, but he’s good. Devoted, caring, tries to make up for everything he missed out on.”   
  
McCoy gets that. A part of him really does – a part of him that isn’t standing in front of himself.   
  
“I’m not going to get Jim pregnant,” McCoy notes dryly. “Whether he is a good father or not. Beyond all the biological difficulties in doing that, you and I both know that the thought of bring some aliens in to do it for us is...well, you know. Why am I even explaining this to myself?”  
  
“The point...” Leah continues, knowing a cue when one’s brought about. “The point is that Jim Kirk is an adult. That side of him is well-within reach, even. Just have faith in him,” she says firmly. “He’s not the same kid we met on that shuttle. He is if you ask him nicely enough in bed,” she adds with a flash of a wicked grin and suddenly McCoy understands too much about why her dress is wrinkled and her hair is mussed. “But he’s changed.”  
  
Simply put and simple enough and McCoy gets it.   
  
She leaves him alone to finish his work and by the time he’s given a blood sample along with a piece of hair and a tissue sample, he’s standing on the transporter pad and waiting for Kirk to come join him. Eventually, he staggers along, but he’s definitely holding the baby in his arms. The lack of a wedding ring on his finger is telling McCoy plainly that the baby doesn’t belong.  
  
“Jim,” McCoy growls his warning.  
  
“Aw, come on, Bones, can’t we keep her?”  
  
“I think your other-you might kill you if you tried,” McCoy points out, not even bothering to go into the protective actions he himself would take and how that might get amped up tenfold if you added some maternal instincts in there. “Give her back.”  
  
“Not yet,” Kirk insists, and he’s not joking this time. He shifts Savannah up in his arms and leans down to press a kiss to her forehead, whispering something to the child that Bones can’t exactly make out. He doesn’t have (and doesn’t want) Vulcan hearing, but that one moment, just that one, he wishes for it. Bones stands fast on the pad and watches with great discomfort as the goodbye is drawn out for almost ten minutes. He shifts and glances away and tries not to pay attention to this because their worlds  _aren’t_  the same, damn it.  
  
Nonetheless, he sighs and takes the steps down the platform to take Savannah into his arms and shift her until he’s looking her straight in the eye. “Don’t ever listen to your father without asking your mother’s advice,” he starts sternly, as if she’s ever going to remember any of these life lessons. “Space is more dangerous than it’s worth and you ought to learn how to ride a horse on the ground. Be nice to your older sister because she might pout at you otherwise, and don’t forget this last bit. It’s the most important. When you grow up, men can’t touch you or I’ll find my grandpappy’s gun and shoot them, even from an alternate universe.”  
  
That said, he feels he’s said his proper departures and hands the baby back to Leah with a firm nod. The nice thing about facing down  _yourself_  is never having to say anything because it’s all understood.  
  
“Okay, let’s go home!” Kirk announces brightly as he bounds onto the platform, dragging Bones with him and earning a broad grin from the doctor. He sounds a bit raw around the edges, but it’s so subtle that Bones doubts anyone but him has noticed. “Energize.” They’ll set things right when they get back. It might take years, but they’ll figure it out.  
  
The last look they get before everything vanishes and the universe is closed off is the strange family unit standing before them. It’s screwed-up, sure. None of them are the healthiest people emotionally in the world, but it seems like it works. That’s really all that matters when you get right down to it. 


	3. Other Side of the Coin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How they got to where they were in Family.

Leah McCoy’s least favourite time of the year happened to occur when annual physicals rolled around and the entire crew of the ship needed vaccinations, physicals, check-ups, and a general all-clear in order to keep travelling through the depths of the universe. McCoy always saved her physical for the very last and had Nurse Chapel perform it based on the fact that McCoy felt she could trust the other woman.  
  
She was the very last and then she could put this disaster behind her for one more year. Year four of the five year mission meant there was only so much left to endure. McCoy sat perfectly still while the scanner drifted up and down and as with all inspections, Leah sat with just one thought repeating in a loop through her mind:  _If Jim gave me anything, so help me god..._  
  
“All done,” Christine assured her, clicking off the device and lifting the chart to begin the last of the paperwork. The mountain of it had been crushing Leah’s soul in her office on a nightly basis, at this point. Christine only looked up from the paperwork the once with an officious look on her face and a tone to match. “How many of your sick days do you think you’re going to take?”  
  
“...what’d he give me?” McCoy instantly reacted.   
  
“You won’t  _need_  them,” Christine replied gently. “I just thought that since you had so many outstanding days, you would want to use them in conjunction with your upcoming leave. It would probably clear faster if we put it in this paperwork.”  
  
“My leave?”  
  
Christine finally  _looked_  at McCoy and something in Leah’s expression must have caused a moment of pause because she didn’t keep speaking as she normally might. The only thing cycling through McCoy’s brain was the constant litany of every last damn space disease that Jim might have picked up on some less-than-sanitary planet and given to her. She was already planning on ways to somehow amend her arrangement with Jim to conjure up a suitable punishment for what he had done – even if McCoy had no clue what crime, exactly, had been committed.  
  
“Leah,” Christine lightly commented, easing the space between them. “You’re pregnant.”  
  
There was an amazing lack of a reaction at that point in time. McCoy just stared straight ahead, gripped the medical bed until her knuckles went white, and then gave a brisk nod. “Put it in the paperwork and sign it, seal it, get it done. I want these goddamn reports off to Starfleet so we don’t have to worry about this bureaucratic bullshit for another year,” she said curtly, tapping her communicator. “McCoy to Uhura, come in.” She had to wait only a scant moment of time before she was replied to.   
  
“Go ahead, Doctor.”  
  
“The physicals are finished. You can contact Starfleet so they can give us the all-clear.”   
  
“Right away, Doctor McCoy,” Uhura replied.   
  
There was a long pause as McCoy didn’t release her hold on the communicator and instead kept staring straight ahead at the same point on the wall she had been fixated on since Christine had given her the news. “Lieutenant Uhura,” she continued, voice slightly hoarse. “When the Captain has a moment, there’s something from the physicals that he needs to sign off on. I’ll meet him in his office when he has the time.”  
  
There was a mild scuffle of conversation just out of earshot and then a quiet agreement.  
  
McCoy gripped the bed even harder, going through a dozen possibilities of the  _how_  and the _what now_  and the problem was that the only thing McCoy could come up with was, ‘what the hell is Jim going to think?’  
  
*  
  
When it came to McCoy, Kirk had a habit of squeezing in time. This time, it was between charting a new astronavigation path and composing objectives for the next mission now that they weren’t docked. He’d left Spock to that and had made for his office as quickly as he could.   
  
The doors glided open and he instantly saw the folders on the desk and McCoy’s stern and pale expression.   
  
“...did something turn up on my physical?” Kirk asked evenly, trying to keep himself from panicking. They were almost four years into the mission and while he knew he had earned the majority of Starfleet’s trust, he still didn’t want any medical diagnosis to give any doubters an excuse to put him on the ground somewhere. “God, Bones, you look like someone’s died.”  
  
“Not exactly,” she said with a groan, leaning forward in the visitor’s chair while Kirk dropped into his own, picking through the folders with a curiosity that had yet to be rivalled by any other in the universe.   
  
What he didn’t understand was why the folders were his and McCoy’s and his  _parents_  and why there were forms. There were endless forms. He hadn’t seen forms in that number since he and McCoy had snuck off to elope one night in San Francisco and they’d come home to Starfleet somehow knowing all about it and making them fill out forms in triplicate. He opened his own folder to skim through it and found...nothing. Well, not nothing, but definitely nothing out of the ordinary.   
  
“I don’t understand,” he confessed, glancing up in time to see McCoy holding her folder out to him. He took that one instead and skimmed a lot of medical and lab results with spiky levels of something or other, which he still wasn’t understanding. “Okay, so you have... _something_ ,” Kirk estimated warily, not ready to jump to any conclusions. “We make sure we’re safe, though, you won’t give it to me.”  
  
“Wish I could,” Bones muttered under her breath and sighed as she leaned back into her seat. “Jim, I’m pregnant. Turns out that hypospray I gave you two months ago wasn’t exactly a contraceptive so much as a placebo. It could have happened any time during that week, I figure.”  
  
Kirk had slowly drifted off and hadn’t consciously heard any of what Bones had just said because his stomach had dropped away from him and his ears suddenly felt like they had been stuffed with thick, hot wax, and suddenly his future became this certainty and when he blinked (for a tiny sliver of a millisecond) he saw the possibility of their child. Suddenly the nerves shifted as they became a rush of pure adrenaline and anxiety and eagerness and he was going to have a  _kid_. This seemed as good a time as any to say what he did next:  
  
“I haven’t had sex in a year.”  
  
“Oh great, and now you’re delusional,” Bones said with a weary scoff.  
  
“With other people, Bones. With other girls and guys. Over a year.”  
  
“And you didn’t think to tell me?”  
  
“Never came up.”  
  
She was swearing under her breath and the word ‘unbelievable’ came up more than once. Bones was already in her mid-thirties and had done her growing up a long time ago. It felt like Kirk was finally coming along, though. At least, that was what he felt like. It was a scary drop down a cliff at this point, but Kirk had lived his life trying to hurl himself from one dangerous activity to the next. And really, being a mature father was probably the most terrifying cliff of all for him, never having had a proper role model for it.  
  
He could hear Pike’s voice in the back of his head, talking about eight-hundred lives and twelve-minutes.  
  
None of that mattered to him in that exact moment. He was going to be a father. He was going to have his own son or daughter and those eight-hundred lives were going to have to do something for themselves, whoever they were. He had a kid to worry about.   
  
“So, parents.”  
  
“God help us,” Bones said with a weary and excited laugh of her own. “You want to tell Joanna she’s going to have a baby sister or should I?”  
  
With that, Kirk’s eyes lit up like the brightest stars in the sky.   
  
 _A daughter_ , the words echoed in his mind to his gleeful delight. “I know I’m the world’s biggest hypocrite, but I’m saying it right now,” he noted, words speedy as his excitement tinged each and every one of them. “She is  _never_  allowed to date anyone from Starfleet. Or anyone at all until she’s, what, thirty? Thirty’s fair.”  
  
*  
  
It was the fifth comment from the staff that broke the camel’s back. There’d been too many whispers behind McCoy’s back and several out-and-out comments, but Scotty’s note of ‘they’re looking plump and delicious as ripe peaches up there lately, Doctor,’ that had her bristling and fed up. She marched straight to the bridge without even dignifying that with a response and ignored Kirk’s greeting and Uhura’s glimmer of concern while finding her way to Chekov’s side.  
  
He had also made a comment to her earlier in the month, citing that she needed some anti-inflammatory to stop her ankles from bulging and that they had invented that particular cream in Russia.  
  
For various reasons (mostly on McCoy’s part), they had told no one of her condition. Spock had gleaned the knowledge himself and McCoy didn’t even want to know when the pointy-eared mind-melder had gotten that out of her.   
  
“Chekov, start a ship wide transmission,” McCoy ordered, ignoring Kirk’s quite murmur of concern from what seemed like  _right_  behind her.   
  
“...Captain?” Chekov asked warily.  
  
“Do what the lady says, Ensign. Or, don’t, but I wouldn’t risk it.”  
  
Chekov cleared his throat and nodded with a look of anxiety all over his face. McCoy felt Kirk’s hand on her shoulder and leaned back into it temporarily while she put together the little speech she was about to level on an unsuspecting ship.   
  
“Go ahead, Doctor,” Chekov said with a gesture while McCoy edged her way in and leaned over the communication system.   
  
McCoy cleared her throat, imagined every last remark she’d had whispered either behind her back or in her direction, felt Kirk’s support right behind her, and knew there was no reason to be apprehensive.  
  
“As many of you have been discussing, I’ve not been exactly myself in recent days. So as to stop rumors right here and right now, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m pregnant. Five months along and yes, it’s the Captain’s, and yes, I’m going to keep the kid. I’ll be taking three weeks off after the birth and then I’ll be back, so don’t think anyone’s escaping me as CMO. If anyone has any comments they’d like to share, my door’s always open and keep in mind we have to update vaccines in a matter of weeks. So quit placing bets on whether or not I got implants,” Bones finished with a mild growl, jabbing her hand on the system to cut the communicator off, hoping that she could shut a couple people up, if at all possible.  
  
She glanced back over her shoulder to see Kirk had drifted back to the Captain’s chair and was swaying back and forth with a thoughtful look on his face. The majority of the crew looked a bit stunned, an echo of how McCoy herself had taken the news.  
  
She gave a steady nod of her head, feeling pretty satisfied with how that had gone and started to head out the door.  
  
“Bones, c’mere.”  
  
Or not quite. She hesitated and drifted back to the chair and stood there above Kirk, waiting for whatever little show he had planned. He eased in close and pressed both palms to her barely-swollen stomach, leaning in to brush his nose back and forth for a second before placing a kiss to the side of it. Bones felt her face flush with the humiliation of turning into a public circus for Jim’s little affection and muttered a ‘Jim, quit it,’ under her breath.  
  
“I’ll see the both of you later,” he promised and grinned, smacking Bones’ ass as she turned to make her way out.  
  
Maybe Bones had spoken too quickly about sparing Kirk’s life.  
  
*  
  
Kirk had done some pretty admirable things, in retrospect.   
  
He hadn’t slept with a single person who wasn’t Bones in over a year and a half. He had stopped drinking as soon as he found out about the pregnancy in commiseration of the fact. He’d  _tried_  to build a cradle (which was all fine and good until Bones used it to store her medical bag and it fell apart in a shatter of wood). He was even reading as many books on how to be a good father as possible.  
  
This was why, in all honesty, Bones felt really, really bad about breaking two of his fingers during the labour. He’d been sent back for the last throes of things and was now trying to juggle his new injury and the small child in his arms. The girl was underweight, but not precariously so.   
  
“Savannah Winona Kirk.”  
  
“Jim, I really still haven’t taken your last name,” Bones mumbled tiredly, the sedatives she was on wearing her down to her bones.   
  
“The McCoy is silent,” Kirk said knowingly.  
  
She gave a groan of a laugh and would retort with more except she was sure they were pumping her with too many drugs to be legal and Kirk had their kid and she was long overdue for some sleep. Bones knows, though, that it was definitely well-worth it. She glanced up at the child for another long moment and reached out her fingers to brush the pale cheek.  
  
Even if they hadn’t planned on this happened, McCoy couldn’t have thought of any other way for their lives to have gone. “She’s so worth it,” she mumbled, exhausted.  
  
“Yeah,” Kirk agreed, sounding pretty awed himself, as if they were staring at the eighth world wonder. “I’m kind of really glad you were a crappy doctor for that one day.”  
  
It was also a sign of how much McCoy loved her daughter at that point that she didn’t assault the baby’s father over that remark. 


End file.
